We've all had that moment. You're reviewing your collection, maybe cross-referencing your database with the games you just pulled from deep storage. Maybe you're taking inventory of games, you're packing up to store in the attic, or maybe you're looking for one game in particular you have an urge to play for the first time in years. All of a sudden, you discover that a game your collection list (and your own memory) says you own isn't where it's supposed to be. Perhaps it's the one you've been wanting to play, or maybe it's the one that should be sitting right next to the one you're looking for, but isn't. To any serious collector, this is a heart-stopping moment of confusion, panic, possibly even rage.





I've recently just moved and had the pleasure (and by pleasure I mean stress) of packing up my entire game collection, along with everything else I own. Upon unpacking in my new digs, I experienced the satisfaction of opening up box after box of games and putting them lovingly back on my shelf where they belong. Out of the chaos, my life was starting to make sense again. But then there was that moment when the box I opened didn't seem to match up alphabetically with the one before it. The boxes were all labeled properly; how could this have happened?!?!

The next thing I know, I'm frantically searching through every pile of boxes I can see looking for the rogue games that somehow didn't stay in order. I imagine it looked like that classic cartoon scene of someone searching through a closet just off-screen, tossing one thing after another behind them in as dramatic and comically haphazard a way as possible. At last, the errant games are found and I start breathing again. But for that 30 seconds, which seemed like an hour, nothing else mattered except finding them.

This got me thinking about other times this has happened to me over the years. Generally I take pretty good care of my collections, but nobody is perfect, and there's always another eventual episode like this one. Just yesterday I had the situation in the picture below happen to me. It took me at least a couple minutes before I remembered that I'd removed the copy of Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor just earlier that day so I could show it to my nephew, who'd never played it before.


One of the worst cases of this happened to me a couple years ago. I was transferring my collection from the old Excel spreadsheet I'd maintained to that point to some fancy new database software specifically made to catalog collections. In the process of doing so, I found that my copy of Super Mario RPG had seemingly gotten up and walked away from me some day without having the courtesy of telling me. I was less than pleased. Not only was I mad at losing track of such a coveted (and these days, expensive) game, I was disappointed at losing one of my favorite RPGs of all time. This was a game I'd beaten more than once over the years, and that I know for a fact I would never sell. To this day, I've yet to replace it, partially because I'm having a hard time coping with the idea of spending the money for it again, and partially because whenever I see it in a used game store I feel those pangs of guilt and heartbreak. I picture my own copy lost in some black hole of my old closet somewhere, scared and lonely, not able to find its way home to me. And now that I've moved, it'll never know where to look for me again.

I'll be moving again in about a year to a year and a half, and I know I'm going to have to go through this process again. I've been thinking of ways to manage the inventory better, and am thinking that instead of labeling the boxes with the name of the console the games are from, I should also list the title letters like the way library shelves are labeled. I'd be curious to hear from some others in the community that have gone through a move, or even just a mishap in their cataloging process that resulted in a missing game. In the retail world they call this "shrink"; the loss of merchandise due to theft, inventory mismanagement, damage, evil wizards, or who knows what else.

Does anyone else have any stories about losing a game they loved for no discernable reason? Did you find it again after a stoke-inducing search through your closests while the rest of your family wondered what the big deal was? I feel like collection shrink is an important enough issue that maybe there should be a support group for it. Consider this article my volunteering to speak first. Let us open ourselves up and cry for the games we've loved, and the games we've lost along the way.

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